Diver's Clothes Lie Empty - Softcover

“[Vendela Vida’s] finest book...With its echoes of Hitchcock and Highsmith, this novel is full of darting pleasures.” (New York Times)

“A brilliant inquiry into the eternal mysteries of being... Told cinematically in one long, bewitching take, Vida’s astutely insightful, keenly suspenseful, surreptitiously metaphysical novel demands to be read in a breath-held trance and then plunged into again.” (Booklist (starred review))

“Vendela Vida’s work is utterly compelling, surprising, economical, lush, beautifully written. Reading her inspires me, and reminds me of how powerful the novel can be - how addictive and vital - and of how rarely a writer as precise, artful, and passionate as her comes along.” (George Saunders)

“Like Bowles’ despairing, existential “The Sheltering Sky,” Vida’s novel penetrates the psyche of an American traveler when confronted with an alien culture and landscape.... [A]n emotionally precise and absorbing meditation on how grief can divest us of our most fundamental sense of self.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

“Every woman writing literary thrillers gets compared to Patricia Highsmith once if she’s lucky, but this is one of the few times it’s felt to me like a hopeful comparison. After this, I’ll read anything Vida writes.” (Chicago Tribune)

“Vendela Vida has written a truly original novel, a work of art that shines with Buñuelian play and cruelty. The situation is discomfiting and addictive. You will be driven to read this novel compulsively, and then you will have the same strange sly smile that I do, now.” (Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers)

“Part glamorous travelogue, part slow-burn mystery, this full-bodied tale of a runaway is at once formally inventive and heartbreakingly familiar. (It’s also insanely funny.)” (Lena Dunham)

“Smart, thoroughly engrossing, funny, and even a bit disturbing. ... Part mystery/thriller and part absurdist/postmodern novel with a feminist slant, it is simultaneously funny and serious.” (New York Journal of Books)

“You will tear through Vendela Vida’s The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty, this wry, edgy, philosophical thriller, this love child of Albert Camus and Patricia Highsmith, this sly satire of Hollywood, this entertaining journey through the vast desert of identity and regret.” (Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins )

“Unequivocally a thriller, but more movingly, a meditation on identity.” (Vanity Fair)